full fathom five

Notes on Teaching: dark and light

A longtime friend who teaches sociology, and is thus keenly observant of group behavior, tells me that the smaller the pie, the more intensely people fight over it.  So academia is a place known for turf-wars, where individuals and groups fight for ownership of concepts, plans, and other intangibles in place of big salaries.  And now that I've left university-teaching for the even smaller pie of adult education programs for immigrants, I'm not surprised to see individuals there clawing even harder for what little power is available.

    Unpaid tutors start out as educators, and are quickly drawn into advocacy for troubled  refugees, championing new immigrants through the bureaucratic labyrinth to citizenship and legal sponsorship for the remainder of their families to come to the U.S.  This is wonderful work, and rewards tutors with the victorious feeling of effectively overcoming bureaucratic obstacles to dramatically transform lives, but they can become blinded to their students' flaws in the process.    

    I've only recently discovered this myself, after working as a Literacy Volunteer with an Afghani refugee for four years to help him regain his profession as a family practice physician.  A. had to take the first job he could qualify for when he came here: drawing blood from patients in the local hospital, which he's kept to uncomplainingly for three years. 

    I was so taken by A.'s positive spirit, courage, and perseverance, that I quickly crossed the line from teaching to advocacy in starting him on the path to re-licensure as a physician in the U.S.  I did everything the current theory of adult education and English-for speakers of other languages (ESOL) advises: to take the student whereever they're at.  That meant, in our case, to start A. learning English through studying for the physician-relicensing exam, rather than by focusing on phonetics and grammar separately.

   But in my zeal to restore A. to his profession, in my belief in him, I lost my objectivity, became blind to the fact that as he gained knowledge of medical terminology in English, he lost his grasp of basic sentence structure.  I realized - only after he failed the exam - that grammar and syntax must be their own focus.  I should have taken him through a couple of years of that alone, before starting him on the sample test materials.  So now we've gone back to basic English. 

    We're also looking at less lofty career-options in the medical field.  In describing the training program for being a surgical tech., I read the brochure in front of us aloud: "It's six months of classroom study, and six months of hands-on training in the operating room, emergency room, etc."  A. stared at "hands-on," and I explained that it was like putting your hands on a microscope in the lab, learning by doing.  He said "Ahhh, I am thinking hands on ends of arms, that required in program."  I started laughing, couldn't help myself, and A. added, "I am thinking, no amputees in program," and collapsed in laughter.  It was the first time we'd ever shared a joke, something almost impossible across languages.  But it also showed me how far we have to go in basic English.
     And that's good, to be looking at A. more realistically now.  I no longer am his blindly loyal champion, so now I'm freer to ask him hard questions about his culture and sensibilities. "How 'bout this shooting guns in the air to celebrate?" I asked him the other day, about the middle east tradition that we see on the news whenever there's a gathering of young men in the streets celebrating a coup or burning enemies in effigy.  A few weeks ago, they were doing it in Baghdad after the soccer victory; a handful of people died from the bullets coming back down.  "I don't understand," I said, adding that besides being dangerous, and besides having to temporarily forget gravity, it would seem that people in such war-torn cities would be sick of gunshots and explosions. "Why do they do it?"
    "Because they stupid!" A. said.  "They have brain of chick," he pointed at his head, "not human."
    It was good to hear that I hadn't been A.'s advocate without reason, that we share the same sensibility I'd suspected when I first met him, the same bone-weariness with violence.               
                              

Worlds Apart

Three incidents have been on my mind since Bush announced his plans for a troop surge in Iraq.  They all demonstrate the folly of our unexamined assumptions about other cultures, the glibbest being that we can bring Democracy to the Middle East.  The first incident is in a book I read last summer: The Places in Between, in which author Rory Stewart writes about the customs he observed in his walk across Afghanistan a few years ago.  At the homes where he stayed for the night, all the men would sit in a room together, to eat and talk.  They would sit in hierarchical order, with the highest-status male sitting furthest from the door, and the servants sitting at or outside the entrance to the room.  Women had no place in the room.   

    When I asked my Afghani student if this was accurate, he said yes, and told me that it's ubiquitous throughout the country.  This spatial hierarchy couldn't be more opposite to the ideal of equality that undergirds democracy. 

    Echoing these hierarchical views was a New Yorker article (by Wm. Finnegan, Dec. 11 issue) about the recent settlement (2001) of Somalis in the mill town of Lewiston, Maine.  A year ago on Martin Luther King Day, a Colby College professor who used to live in the Banta region of southern Somalia, presented a slide show of her host village for the new Somali community.  There were some Bantus - the tribe of Somalis from that area - in the audience who recognized friends and relatives in the village pictures.  Some audience members who had been small children when they'd had to flee the war in this region, saw parents - who had been subsequently slain - for the first time. The presentation, needless to say, was extremely emotional and cathartic for the Bantus.   

    Up till then, the Bantus had gotten along well with Lewiston's other Somalis, ethnic Somalis that make up the majority of the Somali population, even though ethnic Somalis had historically used the Bantus as slaves back in Somalia.  But in Lewiston, Somalian immigrants put aside their differences, knowing they were all lucky to escape their war-torn country to live - at last - in peace under the rule of law.  They didn't want to let feelings that had caused so much strife back home mar their new settlement. 

    However, the slide-presentation gave the Bantus new self-esteem (something that we Americans assume is a good thing).  The Bantus' feelings of tribal-identity were rekindled by the photos of their old village, and they became more confident, outgoing, and chauvinistic, asking for Bantu interpreters at the Lewiston Hospital, rather than those who spoke ethnic Somali. This behavior brought out old feelings of hostility and dominance in the ethnic Somalis, and they started bossing the Bantu's around, ordering them to clean the settlement's mosques and setting kids in the schools against Bantu children.  And that's where relations between the two stand today: dicey.   

    Never could I have predicted this ironic outcome from the Colby professor's well-intentioned outreach to the Somalis by sharing her slides of their homeland.  But that's because I'm a native-speaking American, and - coming from a country that isn't gutted by genocide and racial war - I assume that today's immigrants, because they are from the same country, are basically united.  I assume that pictures of their homeland would kindle a group nostalgia that would make them feel closer, more cohesive.

   Not so.  And I don't want to face the cruel fact that victims of racism and genocide can be hierarchical and biggoted themselves.  And that these feelings could even be triggered in my classroom by my regular, unconsidered practice of showing maps and pictures of students' homelands to welcome them.   

   The third incident was my first testing of my ESL classes, a new requirement of my job as of 2007.  I dutifully read aloud and translated the test-directions to the students, demonstrating how to mark their answer sheets, how to make corrections of their marks if they need to, and how to leave questions they can't answer blank and move on to the next, rather than guessing.  I thought I covered this introduction pretty well. 

    But I never could have anticipated what happened when these predominantly Chinese classes started the test.  Being a collective culture, they wanted to help each other, and when they asked each other for answers and got up and walked around to peer over shoulders at each other's tests, I realized that my test directions had ignored the whole phenomenon of cultural difference!  It never occured to me that my class didn't know, much less share, the primacy of individual learning and performance that Western education is based on.  I just assumed that all immigrants would know to take tests individually, learn individually, think individually, vote individually.   

    Fortunately, I have a couple of competent and willing translators among my students, so I was able to improvise some hasty explanation of individualism, that what each one of them knows or doesn't know, is what we're trying to test.  This wasn't easy, and I'm now suspicious of those test-results. 

    This and the incidents above underscore how presumptuous it is to think that we can export our ideals - especially a concept as deeply paradoxical as Democracy - to other cultures and countries.  (Yet Pres. Bush was saying this just last night on Sixty Minutes).  Democracy's conflicting threads of equality vs. individual achievement, freedom vs. the rule of law, to name just two, present enormous challenges to our own understanding, as native speakers, much less to those of other languages and cultures.   

                 

            

          

Teaching Creative Writing

A reader followed up my post on Colm Toibin, author of "The Master," by an e-mail asking me to comment on encouraging students to publish the work they do in Creative Writing classes.  I shot her off a hurried note on my way to work this morning saying that I can't say much about this not knowing the particular class, its objectives, etc.   

   But I found myself, after mulling it over, with more to say, which I'll try to summarize here, since many bloggers have an interest in traditional publication (in print venues).  In my twenty or so years of teaching creative writing, I occasionally encouraged students to send their work to the campus literary magazine, but rarely beyond that.  I taught at our local branch of the University of Maine, so students were there to get credits towards a degree; not - for the most part - with ambitions to be published writers.  Even so, a few students came and asked me if I thought they should consider writing as a career.   

   I told them that I couldn't answer that, because I'd only known them for one semester.  I didn't know if they had the invisible qualities that go far beyond the page, enabling them to withstand years of rejection while sending their work out for more, and somehow making a living at the same time.   

   I didn't go into detail about this, because nobody wants to hear about rejection, especially people considering sending their work out, who are - by definition - inspired and hopeful about their writing.  So a writing teacher has to tread a fine line between encouraging students, yet being authentic with them.  That's probably why most writing teachers I've known didn't volunteer much on the subject of publication. 

   To the reader who asked me to elaborate on this subject, I guess I feel that if I were in my first creative writing class and a teacher plus others in the class told me to send my work out to publishers, I'd want to know if they themselves were regularly sending out work.  I'd want to know if they know anything about the world they're asking someone else to enter.    

   Besides being better judges of who should try to publish, people who regularly send out work can give you an effective stance to acceptance and rejection.  They know that above a certain level of literacy, publication is a crap-shoot.  A work must be grammatical, the writer should have hacked his/her way through the jungle of cliches, and say something, to keep an editor reading.  But beyond that, there is the whole unpredictable realm of what the editor just had for lunch - oh God, bad fish, and she has to be rushed to the hospital.  Your manuscript gets thrown in the wastebasket by a paramedic.  Or you wrote a great story about a person who gets caught in a dumpster and ends up buried in trash in the town dump, but the editor just read three other stories about the same thing and took the second one - so your story, even though much better, gets rejected.   

   A class with people who know this can be truly supportive.  It can teach writers to move on from rejection and can even give tips on how to case out the market before you commit a lot of time to an idea or story that's already out there.  (This last is limited to short works).   

    But the subject of publication - because it's so arbitrary - is hard to communicate effectively in a class.  A safer subject is all the benefits we get from writing, whether we publish or not.  The wonderful New Hampshire writer Andrea Barrett, author of the great reprise of the explorer Ernest Shackleton's story Endurance, was recently featured on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac," and said that if the great secret of writing got out and people found out what a pleasure it is, everyone would be doing it.

 

                   

Learning Mandarin II

Commenters' questions on the last post brought up several things I forgot to mention.  First, why I got started learning Chinese: not for an anticipated trip to China, but to do my job better right here and now.  The English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classes I teach have mostly Chinese immigrants in them, and it's a no-brainer that teachers who speak students' native language can explain a whole lot more than I can with my miming, pointing, and hoping for students who 1. have dictionaries, and 2. are savvy enough to find stuff in them quickly enough to share it with the class. 

     For years I had a Mandarin-speaking colleague at the local university where I taught Writing, whom I invited last Spring to my ESL class as a guest-speaker, and the place was so packed that people couldn't even sit down.  Students had brought relatives and friends to come see an American speak Chinese.  So I knew that even if I just learned a few words, the students would appreciate my taking baby-steps towards the language gap standing between us and taking up so much time in class.

     After that, I had another guest-speaker to class this past summer - a 19 year-old college student who had studied Mandarin for just two years, but had our class laughing, joking, and telling their life-stories within a few moments.  He filled me with hope that the language wasn't as hard as people thought. And sure enough, while chatting after class, when I asked how he became so fluent in just two years, he said: "It's all in your attitude.  Don't let anyone tell you it's difficult; it isn't, once you train your ears to hear the tones."

     I started doing this by ordering an audio series of CD's (www.Pimsleur.com), and I can now hear distinctions in tones that I couldn't catch till about the fourth 30-minute session.  As I said in the previous post, this audio way of learning makes the process seem amazingly easy compared to the formal classes I'm taking in it at the same time.  And you come away from the audio sessions with phrases and sentences, even paragraphs, you can use right away.   

    One of the commenters last post asked how it works.  At the beginning of each session, a context for the dialogue to come is set up in English: a man meets a woman and wants to start a conversation.  The English instructor tells us to simply listen to what unfolds.  Two speakers then speak in Chinese, having a dialogue of maybe two short paragraphs at a normal pace. 

    Then the English instructor comes in again and tells us that they'll now break the conversation down, going over phrase by phrase, then sentence by sentence - very slowly.  The English instructor translates each phrase into English, and then instructs us to repeat each phrase in Chinese after the speaker.  Speakers start from the end of each phrase or sentence first, and have us repeat each word, going through to its beginning.  Then they'll put the words together again, two or three at a time, then the entire sentence.  In the first part of each 30-minute session, we simply repeat for pronunciation.  But then in the last half of the session, the English instructor will ask "How do you say....?"  The CD will give the learner time to figure out a new combination of words and phrases already learned, and to say them.  Then the Chinese speaker comes in and answers the question, with time for the learner to repeat it.  So you're stretched, but you can't fail.

     Conversation is immediately applicable, and I use it in every ESL class: "Hello, how are you?"  "Excuse me, may I ask, Do you speak Mandarin?  English?  Are you American?  Chinese?"  and yes/no answers to these questions.  The English instructor illuminates grammar within this simple conversation: for instance, the unchanging present tense of Chinese verbs, the syntax of frequency adverbs as in, "I speak a little Mandarin," and how to distinguish the five tones.   

    I was glad to have one of the commenters on the first post (M. Sinclair Stevens at http://www.zanthan.com/japan/nihongo/index.html) confirm my feeling that this is a good audio program I stumbled on to.  She speaks from experience - the gold-standard for learning languages as far as I'm concerned.  You're going to invest a lot of time, you ought to have the best method and best instruction available, and no one can tell you what that is unless they've personally tried various programs.  Her posts on learning Japanese will give you an idea - just as my teenage guest-speaker did - whether you could become fluent in the language in a reasonable amount of time.   

    I feel lucky that here in rural Maine, I can try speaking a new language almost every day with students and my teacher, who - although our class just ended last night - has offered to talk with us on the phone in Chinese at various times each week (for free!), and will also take us to the Chinese table at a local college, where only Chinese is allowed over monthly dinners. It's a sign of these amazing times; plus the addition of the audial and oral side of language-learning that I'm only just now experiencing the importance of.              

Close listening

I've just started learning Mandarin, and I'm doing it by two methods: listening to CD's at home, and taking a class.  In class, I'm learning by the old, familiar method of trying to read the characters (radicals) and words (pinyin) and writing down the corresponding phonetics as the teacher pronounces them, as well as learning grammar.  But the CD's are something I've never tried before, and are thus a revelation. 

    I bought them back in late August, before we went on our vacation, thinking (yeah, sure) that I'd listen to them on the boat for the prescribed thirty-minutes a day.  Of course, I never even took them out of the cellophane.  And when I got home, it was the same thing.  I kept putting off starting them.   

    Finally, I took stock and realised that what was holding me back was all the unconscious assumptions I was carrying around from studying languages in school.  I figured I'd have to move a desk or table into the livingroom where our CD-player is, so that I could have dictionary, notebook, and pen at hand, while keeping one hand on the stop-button so I could write down each word and phrase to cement them in my mind, and on and on.  I'd inflated the act of listening into a big production that seemed to paralyze me.   

    Starting the class broke through this reluctance by relegating the visuals - reading and writing - to classtime, freeing me up to simply listen to the CD's.  But it seemed really foreign at first: just sitting back in an easy chair and relaxing to learn a language.   

    And now that I'm doing it, I realize that this is what makes learning fun.  Listening closely to catch differences in tone and intonation and trying to imitate them is a playful challenge, like singing or playing an instrument.  I like it because it's a bodily skill, or I should say a skill of sensation: hearing, that doesn't involve the intellect.  In fact, when I do more than simply try to parrot the speaker on the CD, when my brain kicks in and tries to divide the sound into separate words and picture their spelling in my mind, it's interruptive.  That's when I have to press the stop button and go back. 

    As long as I simply listen, it's wonderful. You get a real appreciation for your ears and your voice.  It's an amazing way to learn, and I'm loving the way I walk away from the sessions unable to remember anything until about five hours later, when whole phrases resurface to surprise me. 

    The first time I tried one of these out on my Chinese students in my ESL class, the woman nearest me put a hand to her throat and said "My heart jumps when you speak Chinese."  The rest of them nearly fell out of their chairs laughing, and when I asked my teacher about this later in Mandarin class, she said, "They're so delighted that you're trying to speak their language. That's what you're seeing."   

    I think it's more than that, but I don't care.  We're clumsy together now, and the feeling of opportunity that's always been there in teaching has suddenly expanded.    

             

Memorial Day 2006

If anyone had told me a decade ago that I'd be driving an hour South down the Maine Turnpike every Memorial Day to stand beside the Submarine Veterans of WWII with my hand over my heart as a Navy ROTC band plays the national anthem, I'd have laughed or gaped in disbelief.  But today finds me back at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard's Memorial Day Service amongst the old subvets, fewer in number and a bit more stooped than last year. 

   

Raised Quaker and a lifelong pacifist, I've always disdained ritual, particularly of the military kind.  But every year now, I lean forward in my chair to try to catch every name of the 52 downed submarines as they're read by a white-haired subvet at the podium, each name followed by the tolling of a large ship's bell by another subvet standing by.  If I'm not in tears by the end of the bell-tolling ritual, the Navy hymn to those in peril on the sea puts me over the edge.   

                           

What's changed me?  Researching my father from '99 to 2002, finding out what happened to his submarine that disappeared in Fall of '43 before I was born.  In the course of interviewing the old men who were his shipmates, I learned a bit about how their minds move.  "I think about them every day," said one of my father's men from an earlier boat that my father skippered.  "I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder where they are."   

                  

That's what makes the subvets' ritual alive for me.  I can sense the men's minds drawn down to the deep during the tolling of the bells, the Navy hymn, and I know what they ask there in those depths: "Why me?  Why did I survive, and not them?"

   

The only other mind I've glimpsed who's looked at these depths straight on is Shakespeare, in his Tempest's Full Fathom Five song that launched my search for my father. I can't question Shakespeare, but I can ask the subvets where my father most likely was when the water rushed in, and they're not afraid to tell me the truth.   

                   

And so I can feel them with me when I think of a tribute worthy of those "on eternal patrol" as I drive home.  Again, it's Shakespeare, from Romeo and Juliet (act III, sc.ii, l.21):

When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Note: Of all the services, submarines robbed their men of sun, and indeed it seemed "garish" on surfacing after days in the deep.   

Freedom from fear

Teaching ESL is a wonderful job to have at this time of life, because it invariably keeps my focus on what I have, rather than what I don't have.  If I were to give THE major difference between my pre- and post-fifty-year-old selves, this would be it.  In younger days, I truly believed that if only I had this or that one more thing, I'd be happy.  Now I know better, and try to keep my attention on what I do have, in the present.  And my ESL students help me do this. They always send me home newly grateful for the peace and freedom here in the U.S. that let us pursue happiness.  Their intimate knowledge of war, conflict, and political repression, things they don't talk about but that shape the way they think and learn, constantly show me the privileges of the present: a peaceful classroom, the freedom to go where I please - in my own car, a safe road home without fear of bombs or snipers, and the rule of law which lets me assume that I'll find my town, house, and family as I left them.

 

It was freedom from fear that I appreciated most when I drove home the other day from my session with A., the Afghani refugee I tutor for Literacy Volunteers.  We worked on filling out his application for step 1 of the USMLE, the first of three or four eight-hour tests he'll have to take on the seven-year path to become licensed as a physician in the U.S.   A. was a Family Practice doctor in the Ukraine, where he went to medical school; he eventually returned to Afghanistan to set up a practice.  But the Taliban had taken over his homeland, and A. had to flee for his life.  Now, he works on the night-shift as a phlebotomist at a local hospital while learning English by studying for the USMLE.

A. and I worked our way through the application, each writing to-do lists of the extensive accompanying documentation we'd have to gather and xerox over the next week.  We came to the question: What ethnicity are you?  I waited for him to choose one of the eight or nine possible answers you could check off.  But he just sat there, staring at the form.  I said, "Hmmm, this is the one question that's voluntary; they just want it for research purposes."  He shook his head, saying that he wouldn't answer it then. "It separate people," he said.  He told me about Afghani president Hamid Karzai's reaction to that question in a recent newscast.  Despite being a member of the most prominent of his country's several tribes, Karzai answered reporters: "I am Afghani.  We are all one people."  The reporters then tried from another angle, asking, "What's your mother-tongue?"  Karzai, again, wouldn't tell, saying that the 32 Afghan languages and dialects should be seen as his people's talents, not marks of their ethnicity or identity.

 

A. leaned forward in his chair as he said this, his eyes shining.  "Karzai speaks Dari, Pashto, English.  He patted his chest: "I speak Dari, Pashto, and now English."  Then he did something he's never done before: opened up about his past.  He told me about having to leave Afghanistan when he was only twenty. It was 1989, and A. was a first-year medical student at Kaboul University.  Soviet troops had just withdrawn from Afghanistan, but civil war continued between the communist government and Muslim political parties (mujahideen).  Cruise missles went off every night, and the city wasn't safe.  A. was offered a chance to transfer to a medical school in the Ukraine, and although it would cost him an extra year for learning Russian, he jumped at the chance to go to what he thought would be a peaceful country.

But his first bus-ride when he arrived in the Ukraine showed him otherwise.  Passengers were packed tightly in the swaying bus, and A. said it was almost impossible to avoid jostling one's neighbor.  All of a sudden, a Ukrainian yelled at a Moroccan man, pushed him violently away, and the passengers the man fell against turned on him and started pummeling him. The bus-driver stopped the bus, opened the doors, and a group of passengers pushed the foreigner off the bus into the winter slush, jumped on him, and stomped his face into the ice as the bus waited, its doors ajar, the other passengers watching calmly. The man died from his injuries. Another time A. saw a fellow medical student, an Egyptian man, beaten in a cafeteria for putting his tray down at a table of Ukrainians.  The Egyptian was permanently blinded by shards from his broken glasses, and had to drop out of school, go back home.

A. learned quickly to keep his head down and mind his own business.  He knew he was too scared to fight, so he taught himself to run.  Every day he ran around the perimeter of the medical school's gym fifty or sixty times till the sweat poured off him.  Every day, the spector of being attacked by street gangs, made him run faster.  Even so, a kind teacher who had spent some years in Afghanistan warned A. that it was unsafe for him and the other foreign students to go out on the streets after 8pm, no matter how fast he was, and A. obeyed.

 

And now, sixteen years later, A. has finally worked his way to a country that will let him study and learn in peace.  But it's cost him his profession; he's studying his medical school material all over again, this time in English.

He never complains though, and this is another mark of my ESL students, along with not talking (usually) about their pasts.  When I think of how much we Americans complain, in comparison, it strikes me that it must take years of true security, an ingrained freedom from fear, to carp and criticize.  I'm just realizing as I write this that my ESL students don't even complain about gas prices!

And now that I think of it, A. doesn't seem to feel as bereft as I do about losing his profession.  That may be because despite losing the right to practice, he hasn't lost the way medicine's taught him to look at the world.  When I asked him if I could write about him on this blog, telling him what I wanted to write about, he said, "My profession to see people as HUMAN, not by their color, ethnicity, language, age, gender, and religion." 

   

Etymology on the fly

I've been teaching my ESL class of Chinese immigrants how to break words into syllables or vowel units to aid in pronounciation.  The other day, a student jumped ahead in the material (these students are wicked smart!) by asking about prefixes that she'd noticed occuring over and over in English, like re, com, con, dis, multi, trans, etc.  I told her they were based on Latin roots, and wrote a list of them on the board with what meanings I could remember from long-ago Latin plus what I could figure out by context. 

Another student asked about the word "conversation," what the various components were.  Excited by the fact that forty year-old remnants of high school Latin class were wafting to my brain, I quickly broke "conversation" into syllables on the board.  "Con = against," I wrote, "as in 'pro' and 'con.'  'Vers' comes from 'versus' or" - uh, um - "against;" I then wrote "Boston Patriots versus (vs) the Dallas Cowboys," ..."or any of those team sports," I said lamely.  I sensed that I'd dug myself a hole, but still running on fumes of dimly-remembered Latin, I charged on.  "English is complex," I said, then wrote on the board two minus-signs equal a plus, warmed by wisps of even dimmer Algebra now stirred up.  I explained that by some twisted route of usage, the two negatives of con plus versus came out making the positive of conversation, or coming together in talk.

 

The whole class erupted in Chinese, which they've never done before, talking back and forth to their neighbors, punching in stuff on their electronic dictionaries.  "Conversation...conversation," squawked the electronic voiceboxes.  Lin, who had been an accountant in China and is good with numbers, pointed at the board and traced two minuses equalling a plus in the air, translating it to the class in Chinese.

 

I went home and told my husband that something exciting had happened, that I found myself - a neophyte to the field of ESL - suddenly teaching by the seat of my pants instead of a lesson-plan, plunging into the dense thicket of etymology on intuition and memories of high school.   "Boy, I've never realized how those things stick!" I said.

 

Win's hands in the dishwater slowed as I told him about "conversation."  Still looking into the sink, his head went back as if with a long sigh as I talked.  Then he shook his head. "It's from con, together, plus verso, you know, page."

"Oooo," I put my hand to my mouth, knowing that his explanation had cohesiveness and simplicity compared to my convolutions.  He'd also gotten in the 790's on his Latin achievement SAT's way back when, so his memories had more credibility than mine. 

"Coming together for words," he said, shaking drops off his hands. 

"Oh no. You mean 'con' means the exact opposite of 'against?'"   

"Yeah," he said.  "Like conjunction."

So the next class, I had to rewrite 'conversation' on the board and tell the students I was wrong.  I broke it into syllables and told them Win's meanings.  They just stared at me, at a loss for words.  Their faces were neutral, as if nothing clicked.  I thought about their culture, and how it was dangerous in their country to question authority, teachers included.  They probably just couldn't compute "wrong" or "mistake" with "teacher."

And now, checking the dictionary, I find that "conversation" is really from 'conversari,' meaning to live, keep company with; by way of 'convertere,' to turn around.  I'm not going to convertere and tell them I was wrong again.

But I am going to stick with my lesson-plans from now on.            

                                           

Cultural contrasts

This semester I'm teaching a new ESL class for Chinese immigrants.  They work in a Chinese restaurant in a nearby town. 

After the first two classes with them, I wondered why I was walking on air.  Driving home, I realized it wasn't my teaching methods or the minds of my students that had me so thrilled about this class; it was simple flattery.  In faltering English, every one of them thanked me after class. They were sincerely grateful, and showed it every minute of class by being deeply engaged.

I thought of the backwards-baseball-cap guy in the back row of my Creative Writing class this semester, how he keeps a whispered running commentary going to the young women on either side of him.  He actually snickers when I enter the room.  So far, I've tried to staunch his behavior by calling on him repeatedly, which shows him up as unprepared, but doesn't seem to discourage him. 

So I know the next step's coming, and I dread it because of the chain of time-consuming defense on both our parts that it will set off.  I'll first ask him to change his seat and shut up, and then I'll probably have to kick him out of class permanently. He'll then go to the dean and complain, and then I'll have to defend myself.  The administration is always understanding about this, well-acquainted with the large percentage of traditionally-aged students in this state university who aren't ready for college and have no clue what they're doing there.  But it's just a bother, and complicates course-preparation with strategizing, usually on my drives to campus, setting up bad associations with going to work.

I was mentioning my new ESL class to my writer's group the other day, commenting on how wonderful it feels to be thanked at the end of class, and a woman said angrily that one third of the top students at our leading colleges are Asian.  She wasn't mad at the Asians, of course.  She was miffed at the lack of respect for teachers US students have, and assumed that this is the reason for the statistic.

I reminded her of Peter Hessler's wonderful book Rivertown, in which he cites his Chinese students' facility at rote learning, repetition, and copying.  He contrasts it with the individualism we encourage in this culture.  These culturally-based talents in Asian students happen to facilitate ready adaptation to a new culture as well as the classroom.  Just as Hessler's Chinese students picked up and responded to poetry faster and more avidly than his American students, my Chinese students pick up fluency of phrasing faster than any other group of students I've worked with.  Their culturally-based talents for keen listening and repeating or mimicking enable them to pick up the rhythm of speech so quickly it's uncanny.

And so I think the statistics of Asian achievement in US schools aren't based just on their cultural reverence for teachers and learning.  It's that plus the talents their culture has conditioned in them, and surely other factors I'm not yet aware of.  But this makes it no less thrilling to be thanked every day at the end of class.  Something so simple as "Thank you teacha" makes me newly aware of all that's missing in my relationship with native-speakers in the classroom.  Or maybe I'm just burned-out and it's time to retire.      

   

The joy of ESL

I've taught English parttime at our local university for about twenty years now, and during that time, I've noticed that the hardest-working and most respectful students are recent immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Africa, or Eastern Europe.  This gradually got me into ESL, where I've tutored or taught adult immigrants over the last two or three years.  I love working with these people because nearly every interaction jars me into a new awareness of my own ingrained assumptions, and the resulting reflection always ends with the same conclusion: that I'm extraordinarily lucky to have been born and lived all these years in the U.S.  The invisible privileges of peace, freedom, and the rule of law that I've breathed in like air all these years are now tangible at last.  I feel the fullness of them pushing out my chest like an inhalation when I drive around in my car - "anywhere you want," in the amazed words of Alim, my Afghani tutee.

He told me this when we parted after a tutoring session this past July 4; he said "You have good Independence Day, Mary Lee.  You drive to any place you want in country of law."  I drove off realizing that I had hardly been aware it was the fourth of July, that Alim had actually refreshed my memory of high school history by describing the Boston Tea Party during our session.  And when my co-tutor, on call for the weekend at the local hospital where she's a physician, had to step out to call in a prescription for a patient, Alim - who had been a physician before having to flee the Taliban - remarked that we're so lucky to have laws.  He said that in Afghanistan, no one needs a doctor's prescription to get drugs.  All they need is money or a gun.

This past weekend, my husband and I took Alim on a boat trip in the small run-about my husband has for his sailmaking business.  We motored down the Royal River, then out into Casco Bay where we picnicked off the rocky shore of an uninhabited island.  Alim asked if we were allowed to be there, if we had to have a special license.  No, we told him.  He asked if there were police on the island, or in boats nearby, or planes overhead, watching us.  I said no, but noticing his incredulity, I allowed that there were Coast Guard guys who patrolled these waters. 

When we got to Portland, we buzzed in and out of docks along the waterfront, and I pointed out a Coast Guard boat parked at a pier.  Alim nodded, tapping his shoulder to indicate he'd caught the insignia on the officer's sleeve.  But it was clear as we wove among the piers, pulling up close enough to listen to a live band in an outside restaurant on one, crawling along the base of a high, football-field-length hull of an oil-tanker at another, buzzing across the harbor to watch kites flying off Spring Point Marina, and inching between girders under the bridge to South Portland, that we were free.  Turning to follow anything that caught our attention was as easy as breathing in this warm, salty air.   

As we left Portland Harbor headed back to Yarmouth, we passed a seal so close that we could see the startle of its big dark eyes as it caught sight of us, the shine of its wet whiskers as it stared.  It dove, and Alim said,  "Beautiful creature!"   My husband explained that seals don't usually come in so close to shore. 

When we got back to the dock in Yarmouth, Alim asked about four words we'd used on the boat ride.  I dug out the pad and pen I'd brought along and wrote: seal, shell, sail, and hull, and drew pictures to define them.  I tore off the sheet and gave it to him, and we said our goodbyes.  As my husband and I drove off, Win remarked on how agog at America Alim is.  And then we realized that Alim makes us that way too.